Preview: Two Lovers

Crime auteur James Gray shifts gears with new romantic drama.

Having previously worked exclusively in the New York crime film sub-genre, writer-director James Gray shifts creative gears with the new ensemble romantic drama Two Lovers. If that sounds like an unusual change of course, fans of his previous films – Little Odessa, The Yards, 2006′s under-appreciated We Own The Night- will recognize the budding auteur’s trademark color palette and visual vocabulary right away in the trailer below. And of course there’s also the presence of Joaquin Phoenix, Gray’s designated leading man.

Two Lovers, loosely based on among other sources the Dostoevsky novella “White Nights,” also reveals a growing ambition for the upstart filmmaker, as it’s potentially the most emotionally complex work of his career. Leonard Kraditor (Phoenix) returns to his Brooklyn home after getting diagnosed with bipolar disorder. His parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Monoshov) are preparing to sell their dry cleaning business to their neighbors the Cohens, and suggest to that end that Leonard begin a courtship with the family’s daughter (Vinessa Shaw). That budding romance, built on tenderness and compassion, is set against Leonard’s rising passion for his energetic neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), the kept woman of a businessman (Elias Koteas) who misuses her affections. Obviously, much of the dramatic tension turns on Leonard’s choice of women.

Gray’s films often frustrate film goers and critics alike. His bleak visual style, in which endless shades of grays, browns, and blacks surround the characters and only sometimes reveal bursts of color, is admittedly something of an acquired taste. His actors, Phoenix especially, give low-key performances, and combined with the dreary settings his films’ end results are routinely dismissed as leaden or ponderous. Nevertheless, his confidence and his proficiency in conveying emotional complexity have grown by leaps and bounds with each film, and there is a distinct, if not exactly welcoming, narrative voice taking shape throughout. Gray is primarily interested in the unspoken distance between his characters, and a recurring theme in his work suggests that freedom of choice is often only illusory because circumstances (like the monolithic cityscapes surrounding them) confine them past the point of any real hope of action. 

All of which makes him an apt fit to bring anything by famously miserable Russian literature patriarch Dostoevsky to the screen. Gray’s also assembled his best cast yet to tackle the material. Phoenix has grown impressively as an actor throughout his career (His best performance to date, not coincidentally, was in We Own The Night.) Paltrow has labored for years in projects unworthy of her screen presence, while Rossellini and Koteas improve any film in which they participate. Shaw was memorable in her brief turn in 2007′s 3:10 To Yuma; a standout performance could likely present a breakout.

Finally, depending on the accuracy of some reports Phoenix is quitting acting, part of a larger ongoing story that actually doesn’t merit elaboration. But some early reviews point to his turn here becoming a perfect career coda if those rumors are true. Two Lovers opens in limited release this Friday.

-Michael Kabel

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DVD: Cloverfield

Spoiler: It’s Got a Monster!

It’s a sad fact that with so many films and television series produced each year, the same storylines get recycled again and again. Sometimes, though, filmmakers will synthesize multiple successful premises into something that not only survives on its own merit, but also begs the question, “Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?”

Cloverfield is equal parts Godzilla, The Blair Witch Project and Aliens, with some Miracle Mile and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos thrown in for good measure. A giant, seemingly invincible monster crawls from the Atlantic Ocean and ransacks New York. The real story, though, is the struggle of a group of hip twentysomethings to rescue their injured friend and escape before the military “drops the hammer” and annihilates Manhattan. Shot entirely in first person perspective, the action is chronicled by alternately rotating characters via a handheld video camera. It’s a clever concept that transplants the viewer into the action alongside the protagonists, heightening the audience’s suspense to an intensely personal level. 

Besides the tension of the protagonists’ escape, there’s enough terror-inducing elements to unsettle any viewer.  However, with a minimum of gore and profanity (it’s rated PG-13!), the sometimes-horrific events never feel gratuitous or self-indulgent. 

While the suspense is clearly the film’s driving force, it’s the ancillary events surrounding the attack that establish Cloverfield as an ultimately moving drama. At the film’s core is a love story between two longtime friends (Michael Stahl-David and Odette Yustman) that highlights the selflessness of the human spirit in times of catastrophe; yet the filmmakers also wisely depict the inherent greed that unfortunately contrasts with such selflessness in extreme situations. 

Make no mistake though, the film has its flaws.  Screenwriter Drew Goddard is not above cheating to further the plot; one brief sequence rapidly steers our heroes through four different locales strung together by impossible coincidence. More distracting is the tendency to deviate from the action at opportune moments only to abruptly resume at a new plot point.  I personally have no desire to sit through a Warhol-esque documentary of people climbing stairs for an hour, and including such minutiae would naturally interrupt the flow of tension. Still, the decision to ignore moments of little narrative consequence inevitably intrudes upon the otherwise airtight verisimilitude of the storyline proper. It’s a tricky balance that director Matt Reeves never completely pulls off.

As the film’s first twenty minutes take place in exactly the kind of beautiful-people fantasyland popularized by The WB, it’s no surprise that the film already looks dated three months after its release. The tedious exposition fails to establish the individual characters as anything more than stock characters: the lovers, the alpha male, the loudmouth, the bitch, et cetera, et cetera. And with very limited opportunities for internal conflict, it’s impossible to evaluate the acting abilities of the film’s glamorous cast members. They mainly need to look scared – but they do this well. 

Cloverfield might be a singularly unique example of a film in which character development actually should take a back seat to plot: if one becomes too emotionally invested in the characters, it’s possible that the visceral and compelling effect of embedding the audience into the action would diminish. While Reeves manages to effectively create a virtual tour through a disaster film, I couldn’t help wonder if the film’s bleak conclusion would have greater resonance if the characters were fleshed out a little more.

Nevertheless, Cloverfield remains a positively enthralling experience. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, to be sure; but then, you probably haven’t seen it quite like this, or quite this well done.

 - Steve Kabel